Trying out plant plugins

[Gnarly Cranium]

There's a painful shortage of good info on plant plugins out there, on the internet in general and on forums. I've spent the past few weeks tearing my hair out trying to find one that will suit my needs in max 6, and I thought I'd jot down my findings in case anybody else finds it helpful. I'm certainly no expert on optimizing scenes for good render times, I'm just a self-taught freelancer doing what I can. My machine may have issues that will not correlate with the behavior of these products on other people's computers-- this is just my experience with trying to test these plugins.

 

 

I have an Opteron 150 machine with a GeForce FX5950 Ultra video card, and I'm running max 6 in OpenGL, with no other plugins besides the plant stuff.

 

My current project is two mid-detail hopsital flyarounds about a minute or so each for a DVD-- one will be 15 acres with many buildings, currently I'm working on a smaller one.

 

For these tests I'm trying to add plants to a 30,000 poly building scene with 1 sunlight with raytraced shadows and 1 skylight with shadow-casting turned off. (I'm still trying to find a good light dome script, since max's GI is so screamingly SLOW). I'm trying to keep the render time below 2 or 3 minutes a frame.

 

 

 

When I try to scatter 1500 instanced AEC scotch pines (AEC trees are the kind that come with max 6, this one 68,915 polys each at medium detail) across the landscape, max says it's run out of memory and crashes. (considering the scene would end up with over 100 million polys, can ya blame it?)

 

When I try to scatter 1500 instanced 2D Bionatics EasyNat pines (2 billboards with a trunk, for a grand total of 4 polys each) max instacrashes with no error message. I reloaded the scene, collapsed the pine to an Editable Mesh, and then the trees scattered successfully. With ALL other geometry but the trees turned off, the render time was 31min. (WTF?!) And this isn't even taking into account the weird texture-glitching problem I've been having with this one-- every so often the plants totally wig out on me. I called the number on the Bionatics website for help, and the guy who picks up is always very nice and helpful, but he's not a tech and it took days to get any reply from the support people when I emailed them-- and about a WEEK before they bothered to tell me that the guy who fixes stuff in EasyNat is on vacation for 3 weeks so the problem won't get fixed till then. (ARGH!!)

 

When I scatter (or SpeedForest) 1500 SpeedTree weeping willows (RT_low detail, 628 polys), the resulting scene renders in 2min 35sec. Using three different types of trees instead of 1, the render time went up to 7 minutes. With the 3 different types of trees, switching from raytraced shadows to SpeedShadows made the render time 1 min 25secs-- but I haven't figured out yet how to use raytraced shadows on the buildings and Speedshadows on just the trees. I have asked the support people at SpeedTree and Digimation a few dumb questions, and they replied helpfully within hours, doubtless they can help me with that too.

 

I can't figure out how the heck to make 1500 RPC trees. Scatter doesn't work, SpeedForest works fine except that it makes instanced objects and apparently RPCs go all wacky if you instance them. The RPCs come with their own thing called 'mass populate' which I think would spread them around, but for the life of me I can't make heads nor tails of it (yeah yeah I should dig up some instructions, but frankly I'm getting sick of this). I finally just arrayed 1500 Red Ash trees in a few rows, and even without any lights or anything else in the scene it took 2 minutes to render.

 

Xfrog's demo of Xfrog TUNE, the program for turning the poly count on the trees way down, has its Save and Export functions disabled. All the sample Xfrog trees have massive polycounts, comparable to that AEC spruce or even four times as bad. So, I can't effectively make a test with those to compare with the others, though I really wish I could. Would anybody happen to have an Xfrog model tuned down to under 2,000 polys, that I could use for such a test??

 

Onyx doesn't appear to have any demos for their plant plugins. I've emailed them asking about it yesterday and have not yet received a response.

 

I haven't tried the Itoo stuff yet, though I might-- free is cool, but always-facing 2D billboards tend to look pretty crappy.

 

 

 

Quality-- For the general look of the trees, I like the Xfrog trees the best. EasyNat comes in a close second. Speedtree is alright, though not fantastic. RPC trees are hard to compare with the rest, they look.... a bit funky. The AEC trees don't appear to have any textures, and don't really look very good.

 

Customizability-- Xfrog and Bionatics have very advanced options-- the trees can be grown to different ages, the types and sizes of leaves and whatnot modified, to some extent even without using the actual tree-modeling programs Xfrog and Bionatics make. SpeedTree comes with its cad program, and the foresting utility that also comes with it has all the usual transformation options of a Scatter, plus an option to keep the trees from colliding.

 

Shadows-- Xfrog trees don't seem to have any problems casting shadows. Likewise, EasyNat trees do just fine with raytraced shadows, and you can even squirrel by with mapped ones in certain situations. RPCs don't cast shadows at all, unless you go through gyrations to render out a projection map for the light, which would be a pain to untangle if there are buildings also present. SpeedTrees cast kinda funky shadows, I'm going to need to figure out how to use the shadow type that comes with them while still using raytraced shadows on the buildings, but that shouldn't be impossible, especially since I'm probably going to render the trees in their own run and combine them in post.

 

Plant Selection-- The Xfrog plant library is huge and wonderful-- problem is you can only buy them in big sections, so if you really need like 5 different trees that are in different categories, you'll end up spending a lot of money. EasyNat has a much smaller library, but you can pick the trees you want individually. SpeedTree has a medium-big library, and as far as I can tell when you get the program you get access to the whole thing! Only about a dozen AEC plants came with max, probably you can get more elsewhere, but I wouldn't bother.

 

Price is fairly comparable for most of these, if I get all the components I'd need-- it'll probably add up to about $500.

 

 

 

Long (long, long, aggravating!!!) story short, right now it's looking like I might get SpeedTree.

 

I encourage other folks to comment on their experiences with plant plugins, and what the different ones are good for.

[PellePixel]

Hi

Did a small comparision months ago.. choosed Speedtree in front of Bionactics... think most because of speed flexiblity and price. U have to use NatEx to edit?

I made a scene with total 600 trees (9 instanced variants) - every tree about 3000 poly (because I have to come close)

Render w VRAY with GI and VRAY-shadow and they come up remarkable quick with nice shadows... minutes..

You have to spend some time make better trees with new leaves becuase the enlosed tree are crap. Disadvantage is that the tree at distance, for example in an aerial views, come up quite sterotypic as you said, and the leaves-poly are pointed in a way so either you get leaves rendering flat bright or in shadow depending of your viewpoint and the sun. There are only a small angle where you get the nice blended light into the leave branch.

Enclosed a 3D-sketch

[Mokiloke]

Hmm Ive gone though sililar motions quite a few times still yet to have satisfactory results.

 

- For 2D photoshop gives the most joy exept the shadows get tricky for dense foliage

 

- I have found a nice way to populate a surface without plugins, first a draw a spline on a crazy random path that criss crosses across your surface. Then I use a conform space warp to meld the spline with the surface, assuming there is some changes in elevation in your surface. Then I use the spacing tool and wham hundreds of trees, no plugins.

 

- RPCs were reasonably successful thought the tree quality can be a bit lacking

[pradipta]

very nice and helpful article. thanks Gnarly for the comparism. i worked with xFrog and it's so heavy that i could not make much out of it for most of the work. now i am playing with Onyx tree after I saw Jeff using this also. i'd say it's good, not fantastic but still can be tweaked to the likings. also got medium range library and not so heavy in mesh like xFrog.

 

compositing with photoshop seems very tricky and takes more time in adusting and making shadows etc.

[Brolloks]

Old thread but I was wondering if any new findings have occured?

[oluv]

when rendering with vray, you can use vraymeshes with full-polygon trees like those from xfrog or onyx, and scatter them around as instances. they will render fine in vray, i don't know what the limit in polygons is, but vray never made problems. but avoid using opacity maps, this will kill render-times.

i had scenes with thousands of onyx trees and bushes, 6 different ones, that were instanced as vraymeshes, and they rendered pretty well.

[gfa2]

i had scenes with thousands of onyx trees and bushes, 6 different ones, that were instanced as vraymeshes, and they rendered pretty well.

 

I am also fighting this tree thing (I'm not the only one...that's comforting). Can you show us some samples? What kind of render times do you see? Have you tried large renders (3000+ px wide) with lots of Onyx trees?

[e-YELLOWCABS.COM]

keep in touch, i've just bought xfrog 3.5 lite...

don't have time to read carefully manuals: trees are big and when i render them with vray, message arrives: some faces have got wrong uw maps, in loop.

next week end, i'll see...

[jow]

@PIERRE,

try importing your xfrog models in 3ds format instead of xfr format,it should fix the mapping problem...

[Cesar Enrique]

Hello everybody.....Excuse me Justin OTTOWAY, but, I have the same maping problem, I tryed your method, I have used the xfrog program and export one palm to 3DS format, and at the time of importing the tree palm to max, the maping coordinates are solved and ok, BUT the opacity is lost, so in the render, foliage is not transparent, and you can see the plane that has "stamped" the texture of the foliage, and instead of be transparent, it is grey, I will be pleased if you can help us all with this, thank you.

 

Best Regards.

[Amen]

Hi, I am also interested in a good plant plugin.

Has anybody tried Vue5 with the plugin for max?

Here a link:

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/xstream/vue_5_xstream_bundle/

Maybe this is something to look into.

Jan

[jow]

Hello everybody.....Excuse me Justin OTTOWAY, but, I have the same maping problem, I tryed your method, I have used the xfrog program and export one palm to 3DS format, and at the time of importing the tree palm to max, the maping coordinates are solved and ok, BUT the opacity is lost, so in the render, foliage is not transparent, and you can see the plane that has "stamped" the texture of the foliage, and instead of be transparent, it is grey, I will be pleased if you can help us all with this, thank you.

Best Regards.

hi Cesar, once you have your model in max,open the leaf mat. in the mat editor.

in there you need to copy the diffuse map(the leaf) into the opacity slot.

open the opacity map and under MONO CHANNEL OUTPUT,tick the alpha slot.

save and your done..

[anvaraziz]

as for now VUE is great,,

now they have intgration with max too,, but i doubt renders like Vray 'll support Vue.. can any one confirm this,,,

if Vray supports vue on max,, that ll be great....

[jow]

i know vray supports plants imported from Vue 5 Infinite..

[oluv]

I am also fighting this tree thing (I'm not the only one...that's comforting). Can you show us some samples? What kind of render times do you see? Have you tried large renders (3000+ px wide) with lots of Onyx trees?

 

these are 2 old tests with vray. i had instanced about 2000 trees in this scene, adding vray-displacement grass for the ground. vray didn't even hesitate to render them. the rendering-times were pretty normal, nothing unusual. though i only made tests like 800x600.

 

after these tests i only made one big rendering (2600x1950) with lots of onyx-trees and it didn't cause any problems either. the rendering-time 4-5 hours, i can't remember but i hadn't optimized the settings at all.

[Mechadus]

Howdy -

I was just browsing around all sorts of places trying to find answers to my own woefull dilemas, when I happened on this post. My company just recently switched to vray, and had to completely rethink how we did trees. For a long time we made "2.5D" sprites - Similar to what Vue5 generates... Since Vray hates transparency, we opted for Onyxtree instead (just because of how realistic of trees it can produce). Using Vray Proxies I have found that it is indeed true that you can literaly have unlimited numbers of insanely high poly trees, however, it does certainly begin to affect render time at a point. I have a scene right now where the camera flys over a large group of very bushy proxy trees, and though it doesnt crash anymore (on the newer machines anyway) the anti-aliaser basicaly stops the render when it hits these trees. The best solution that I have found so far is actually using 2 variants of these trees (one for close-up shots and one for distant shots) with different poly counts to try ans speed up the render. ANyway, just thought I would put in my 2 cents

 

-Nick

[Devin Johnston]

I own Speed Trees, Onyx Trees, and RPC trees and out of all of them I most usually use RPC trees. Speed trees can be nice if you pick the right tree, but I find they come out to saturated and they slow down rendering if your not using the speed shadow option. Oh..as far as I know you can't use a ray traced shadow and a speed shadow in the same file, every time I've tried it the machine crashes. Onyx trees are kind of similar to speed trees although you can vary the poly count I don't use them much. RPC trees are simple, they look descent, and they don't slow down rendering times very much. If Archvision would come out with a tree that had a random seed generator in it to vary the look of the tree and it would also interact with GI then I would probably use them all the time.

[Ernest Burden III]

If Archvision would come out with a tree that had a random seed generator in it to vary the look of the tree and it would also interact with GI then I would probably use them all the time.

 

I've been working on tree ideas, and have worked on random-seed, variable polycount (animatable) methods to produce medium distance to background trees 3D low polygon. Close-up is harder, and Onxy is probably best, I'm going to buy it.

 

Now..why should trees interect with GI? They just have to interact with general light and shadow, a tree doesn't bounce much light back like a concrete patio.

[anthony cortez]

I've gone through my whole fiasco of choosing which Tree program to use too. I've used RPC, SpeedTrees, NatFX, and even Maya Paint FX. Lately however, I've been getting used to using Vue 5 Infinite in my pipeline. Its got great integration with Max, you can render scenes with billions of polygons using standard, GI or HDRI lighting, its even got a good tool for generating forests and other ecosystems.

The other nice thing about generating these ecosystems, is that it can be used with other objects other than Vue trees, I'm going to try experimenting with importing and distributing NatFX plants into Vue and see if there are any limitations. I do recommend giving Vue a try. Attached is an image of my latest piece.

[Devin Johnston]

I've been working on tree ideas, and have worked on random-seed, variable polycount (animatable) methods to produce medium distance to background trees 3D low polygon. Close-up is harder, and Onxy is probably best, I'm going to buy it.

 

Now..why should trees interect with GI? They just have to interact with general light and shadow, a tree doesn't bounce much light back like a concrete patio.

 

I should have been clearer; I was mostly talking about RPC people in that case. Just think how good an RPC person would look in Maxwell if it could interact with the calculations! I know that is too much to ask for that's why I'm using AXYZ people for Maxwell stuff.

[oluv]

I've been getting used to using Vue 5 Infinite in my pipeline. Its got great integration with Max, you can render scenes with billions of polygons using standard, GI or HDRI lighting, its even got a good tool for generating forests and other ecosystems.

 

do you render your vue scenes with vue's built in gi-renderer, or do you use vray or other? it is possible to use vray for rendering vue-plants? but as far as i know vue-plants are also using opacity-maps quite a lot, therefore this should slow down vray rendering.

[Visual Henry]

Hi,

Just have to say this.

If VUE 5 has a good integration with max, then you should check out GroundWiz Planting tool for 3ds max. Now that seems to me to be a REALLY GOOD integration with max.

[antonio_frias]

Salut Pierre

When you get that message, select your xfrog tree, apply a UVmap and select faces. I think that should solve your problem

[Sketchrender]

CAn A survey like the one for 3d STUDIO MAX BE SET UP TO SEE WHO IS USING WHAT.

THIS TOPIC IS VERY CONFUSING TO SORT OUT.

I WANT TO PURCHASE SOMETHING FOR MAX ONLY THERE ARE SO MANY CONFLICTING REPORTS.

 

PHIL

[Stoo-AVI]

Some useful opinions on here, thanks.

 

I've tried out everything I can find to find my company a workable solution and I'm erring towards a Bionatics solution (either natFX or easyNAT) at the moment because of it's quality and adaptability although I've found a pretty big issue when it comes to animating which I hope they can fix.

 

I would like to try Onyx but it seems that there is no demo available and I can't recommend to my employers that we buy it blind - Please correct if there is actually a demo available. I've also tried XFrog but their customer support seems a bit poor - I was promised info' on a new build over two months ago and have received nothing. I also requested a demo through the usual channels on their website and haven't even had the courtesy of a reply. Very poor IMO.

 

One thing I would contest from what I've read, however, is Vue - We had a team of three people working with the XStream plugin and found it unusable. It was incredibly unstable and future revisions which I tested just did not perform, either crashing or offering very poor results regarding lighting and image quality. Maybe that has been resolved to a degree but to us it seemed that the ILM testimony caused them to try and cash in on the situation.